All language subtitles for BBC.What.is.Beauty.PDTV.XviD.AC3.MVGroup.org.eng

Hi. Here's a beautiful artwork.

Nice, isn't it?

Keep thinking of that.

Now think of something completely
different that is still beautiful.

Why is beauty still happening
if nothing else is?

Beauty, this vague word,
describes a very real effect -

the rush of pleasure
you get from beauty.

I'd like to look at this vagueness
and see what really goes into it.

So it's not so vague any more.

I think there are laws
by which beauty -

this indefinable word -
can be defined.

It's true I made them up,
but I believe in them

and, in this programme,
I will explain what they are.

There's one operating right now
and I'll be telling you
what it is in a few minutes.

Here's some more beautiful art.

What makes it beautiful?

Is it because faces are beautiful,
flowers are, or is it

the way the art has been done?

I'm driving now across
another beauty experience,
a beautiful bridge.

Its totally modern forms flash by.
And whenever I see them,

I ask myself, does beauty and art
change over time?

Is beauty always in the
eye of the beholder?

These are normal questions
that anyone might ask.

I think there ought to be
clear answers to them.

What's the main question again?

It's spelled out in capital letters
in the title of this programme.

The main problem with defining
beauty in art is having something
definite to point to.

So I've picked out 10 different
art works from all over the world

and different points in history
and, over the next hour,

I'm going to look at them with you.
I'm going to salute

the particular kind of beauty
that each different one has,
celebrate it and enjoy it

and I'm going to try and say
what it is that, for me,

in each case, is making that
particular beauty happen.

This is the first one.
It's a bridge.

The Millau Viaduct
in southern France.

Designed by the
British architect Norman Foster.

I've been over it many times.

You could say it's just a useful
tool for getting from A to B.

It's a motorway, basically.
I say it's an inspiring object.

It's beautiful.

It has the kind of beauty
that I think goes into art.

To me,
this stands for awe at nature,

not just nature, but real,
powerful staggering awe.

So I'm proposing that nature
and the way art

always returns to nature is one big
principle behind beauty in art.

Nature.
One way or another, nature's awesome
presence gets repackaged in art.

The way it's happening here is
a very modern experience of nature.

This is not a Victorian suspension
bridge, where you feel the heaviness
and the mass. It's delicate.

It can almost disappear in the
glinting light of the valley.

Those white pyramid shapes
are like cartoon mountain shapes.

A computer-generated
engineering feat,

where 240,000 tons of concrete
and steel can seem lightweight.

And driving across it
can feel like you're flying.

The style of the bridge
is minimalism. Less is more.

There's always been this
mood in art, in all periods.

A sense of something honed down.

A quietness, a calm, stripped back,
pared down, a visual essence.

A kind of minimalism is there
in art from 1,000 years ago,

where nature is represented as
so many clearly readable signs.

The world, trees, plants, people.

The forms are purified.
It's a kind of religious minimalism.

Anything superfluous to the
religious message is stripped away.

But that stripping down
produces strong shapes

which have their own
stripped down duty beauty.

You step into a modern art gallery
and beauty is very different.

You might think it isn't there
at all, and nature isn't either.

But hang on,
nature's structures are there.

Light gleaming,
surfaces reflecting,

the feeling of space, the experience
of nature is honed down

by that kind of art into a single,
abstract effect.

The bridge is in that
stripped-down tradition.

It's modern, but it answers
a timeless yearning.

From the distance, on a cloudy day,
with the thunder rumbling,
it almost seems part of nature.

Like a tree springing
out of the ground,

each of those columns
is integrated with nature.

As well as being in it,
it does something to it -
it makes you re-see it.

It tells you about the hugeness and
light of the span of that valley.

It tells you how beyond belief
the valley is.

Here's a structure in nature -
a valley.

Here's a valley shape in
abstract art by Morris Louis

Van Gogh shows a tangled structure
in a painting of almond blossoms

Then there's a tangled structure
in an abstract painting
by Jackson Pollock.

From the bridge,
the world looms out.

Nature sending out its message.

We're hard-wired as a species
to respond to it.

We make beautiful art full of it.

We probably couldn't stop
if we tried.

The next principle of beauty in art
requires a change of gear.

From art about nature...
to art about people.

In about 1455, in a town called
Monterchi near Florence in Italy,

an artist paints
a pregnant Madonna.

The artist's mother was born here so
it has a personal meaning for him.

The mother of the artist
and Mary, the Mother of Christ.

But the principle behind
this painting's beauty, for me,

is much simpler than that.
In fact, it's simplicity itself.

Simplicity -
the soul getting refreshed from

everything suddenly getting a bit
uncluttered and calmed down.

It's very unusual
for a Renaissance Madonna to be
pictured actually pregnant.

It was considered a bit too physical
for such a celestial being.

What is particularly touching here
is how believable pregnancy is.

It's a warmly human picture.

But not just that. Its simplicity
is stark and burning as well.

The most important event
in the world is on the way.

I like the weirdness of
the place it's presented in.

Contrasting with its beautiful
countryside surroundings,

here it's all drabness,
as if nothing's happening.

A plain municipal building.

You wouldn't expect to
find beautiful art here.

You might expect to find
a meeting of local councillors.

Instead, there's a beautiful
Renaissance altarpiece

by Piero della Francesca, done
originally for a chapel in the town.

All Piero's paintings
were done in this same region,
the border of Tuscany and Umbria,

where the landscape is still
recognisable from the backgrounds
of many of them.

The same eye, tuned to the pleasure
of a beautiful landscape

that never changes,
orders shapes in a painting

so they, too, seem timeless.

A tent seen head-on,

its opening exactly
in the middle of the picture.

A simple, symmetrical opposition.

A woman with a beautiful,
youthful face simply delineated.

The woman exactly in
the middle of the picture.

Two shapes exactly the same,
but reversed,

the angels holding the tent flaps
open, the colours exactly balanced.

All their halos make accents
in the top part of the picture,

matching their feet
in the bottom part.

Those same colours but reversed.

What simplicity in art is for is
elegance of communication,

so whatever complexity the art has
can come across beautifully.

All these tweaks of difference are
a foil to the overall simplicity

to draw your attention to it, making
you see simplicity even more.

A pregnant woman in a tent,
the openings furled up,

as if the whole space
of the tent is a womb -

the creation of life
going on inside.

All art strives to simplify

and geometric arrangement
is a way of doing that.

Piero is very symmetrical.

When another Renaissance artist,
Bellini,

does geometry 50 years later,
he's very triangular.

A lot of blue triangles.

One big triangle.

Blue triangle
in a horizontal expanse.

In our era, modern art attacks.

Blue triangle in a black rectangle
by Malevich in 1915.

The old gets blasted away.
But actually,

it's the old's pure geometry that
the new is very interested in.

I really like the way that
Renaissance geometric shapes

become a visual tradition
for future artists to draw on.

I think the conventional way
of depicting light in art is
something like that.

Like anyone else, my mood is
always affected by light.

I think, in art, the meaning
of the effect changes over time

because society changes.

So the emotion
serves a different purpose.

An Inner Glow,
by Rothko in the 1950s,

might be fear of the bomb,
or the unconscious.

It's a disturbing glow.

A glow in a seascape by
Claude Lorrain is

the glow of an imagined
golden age of the past.

The glow of nostalgia.

A point of light radiating
outwards in a Turner is

the romantic inner turbulence that
people of the age of Romanticism

thought was expressed
in turbulent nature.

Radiating light in a Tintoretto
from the age of the renaissance is

the light of Christian redemption,
the spirit of Jesus.

I am the Light.

The way the light is painted is
beautiful in the same way

in all the pictures,
but the meaning changes.

A church bell rings out in Cicely
in the town of Monreale,

where the next
beautiful art experience is at.

When we get in there,
don't think and I won't talk.

Just enjoy a satisfying,
luxurious visual effect.

These are mosaics in a Norman
church, built in the 12th century.

Work began in 1174.

The mosaics took 10 years
to complete.

There are many things that are
beautiful about them.

The building is a giant light-box.
It throws light around.

The natural, streaming, white light
coming in through the high windows

which reflects off the gold,
marble and glass mosaic pictures -

reflects unevenly, so the scenes
seem to glint and to shimmer.

But the principle that I would
say makes it all work

is the principle of unity.

Unity. Many different things
organised so that,

no matter how complicated
each one is, they all seem to
fit together as part of one thing.

This is unity in action.

6,000 square metres
of flowing visual energy,

flowing towards the super being

pictured at the top
of the apse of the church,

that whole golden wall
at the end of the nave.

And flowing out again
to everything else.

I love the overwhelming
feeling of it all.

But I also love the physical basis
of all that transcendence,

the way it's done using
very specific materials.

Here's a handful of
mosaic tesserae -

covered marble and glass and bits
of gold leaf set within clear glass.

Different, uneven little cubes -
that's what a mosaic is made of.

A mosaic artist
works in a particular way.

They put together bits deliberately
unevenly but so there's

a visual rightness in relation
from one bit to another.

It's a rightness that the artist
feels, so that each bit

stands for a decision taken
about an overall visual unity.

And that visual sense continues
in the big shapes and patterns

of the mosaic
picture system in the church.

The same kind of rhythm
runs through everything -

the pictures
and the place the pictures are in.

One picture's forms echo and repeat
another picture's forms.

And all their forms echo and repeat
the forms of the architecture.

This art was for a society that
had certain ruling ideas.

They were society's
conception of itself,

ideas about how reality is ordered.

The unity principle of the art
connects to that idea of reality.

Everyone has their place and the way
people are positioned in society

is reflected by beautiful art -

a hierarchy of the greater
and the lesser.

The greatest is so great,
one of his fingers is a metre long.

A symbolic Christ
tells us about unity.

The human and the divine
are unified in his person.

The hand gesture -
the last two fingers making a circle
with the thumb

and the first two fingers
separated from the others -
is a symbol for that.

The human, the divine
are unified, the circle.

Bless you all.

Now for a crazy rumbling sound.

LOW GUTTURAL TONE

For 50,000 years,

Stone Age man painted animals
on the walls of caves.

The style never changed much

and that incredibly long-lasting
style is what I'm celebrating now.

For me, the magic of the beauty
of cave art

is in the transformation of dirty
little piles of coloured pigment

into a magic illusion of
the artist's living reality.

Transformation.

The world. My head.

Get that stuff in here
in a form that makes sense.

Maybe art is the way to go.

That's a caveman thinking.

But it's also any artist
thinking at any time.

The way transformation works
in cave art

is that something real
out there in the world

is transformed into
something symbolic here in the cave.

Cave art isn't about
beautifying the habitat.

The cave artists didn't live
in the caves,

they lived in
huts made of mud and bone.

They only painted here,
far from any natural light.

No-one could live here.

Let's get in there
and get out again.

These are two life-sized horses

in the Peche Merle cave
in the Dordogne in France.

The spots and handprints
are magic symbols.

They didn't paint everywhere in
the cave, only special parts of it,

where magic rituals had gone on
for thousands of years.

Here's another magic spot at
Peche Merle, fragments of animals.

Like modern art, the black line has
a life of its own.

It suggests lots of things at once -
movement, speed, shape,

and the shape broken up, as if
you're seeing a lot of glimpses.

And the parts suggest a whole,
but the whole is never quite there.

A simple mark on a rough surface.

From those elements alone
you feel you're out there,

or what's out there is in here.

The magic of cave art has
a very definite purpose.

The aim is to hunt and kill animals.

They're in the cave, thoughtful,
in the dark,

within themselves, soulful.

Outside it's a hostile environment -
they're always fighting the animals.

In the dark they use artistic skills
to make the cave soulful.

The animals
are much bigger than them.

They see a natural rock formation

that looks like
the profile of a horse.

They paint a little horse's head
in there.

Now THEY'RE calling the shots.

Art is always about transformation
in some way.

The Dutch artist Aelbert Cuyp
paints animals in the 17th century.

This is much more like our idea
of art than a cave artist's idea.

But both types of artist
are not just capturing a scene.

They're doing it in such a way

that the scene is transformed into
the symbolic universe of the artist.

Nice animals.

Psychic animals.

But they're both psychic, really,
in that, in each case,

the beauty stands for
all sorts of ideas.

Cuyp paints cows in a field.

They're really there
to frame a landscape

full of poetic evening light.

We feel filled up with
peaceful calm.

We're responding to
the painted image in our own way.

A Stone Age artist paints
magic bulls hurtling through space -

his audience responds to
the painted image in THEIR own way.

They cast spells on it and
worship it and throw spears at it.

It's not that the animals were
beautiful and so the cavemen
naturally wanted to paint them.

Painting the animals was a psychic
operation by which the cavemen

imbued the animals with a powerful
force that they wanted to absorb.

They didn't look at art like we do,

looking at something very distanced
from ourselves,

finding it nice,
making judgements about it

and forgetting about it until
we next go to a gallery.

When they painted they were
performing something,

manifesting through pictures

a force they found powerful
so that they could absorb it,

so that they could control it.

And the magic element required for
this big transformation was beauty.

They do the performance,
they look at it.

What they see, we find beautiful.

What they get from it is recognition

that the transformation
has happened.

After the magic ritual they
crawled out of the cave darkness,

blinking in the light.

Ladies and gentlemen,
we are floating in space.

Where am I?

Spatial grandiosity, sheer white,

beautifully finished, polished,
dusky blondewood floors.

The features finished to
inhuman perfection.

Humans present
but not human clutter.

The feeling of an army of cleaners
with PhDs in dusting.

It's the contemporary
art gallery experience.

New contemporary art galleries

are going up all the time
all over the world.

This is the latest one.
The Brandhorst Museum in Munich.

Built in 2009, its streamlined
spaces demonstrate,

as all such spaces do,
the priority of the particular stuff

that the contemporary art-gallery
experience relies on, which is...

The surroundings.

Not the art but the stuff that
surrounds it is where the beauty is.

I always think it's funny that
contemporary art is shown against

a backdrop of pure white,

like the humble cell of a monk,

as if it really does have
something religious to offer

but at the same time it's such
a vast cell,

such a huge, amplified,
expensive whiteness,

it's as if the cell
has something to, well, sell.

How do you get your head round
what's really going on now

after all those centuries
of greatness in art?

Many people don't expect
contemporary art to be about beauty

but we're still human,
and a hunger for beauty is part of
what makes us human,

like our tendency to be religious.

The contemporary art cult is full of
the voodoo mysticism of religion.

But it lets the cult members off
religion's other traditional task,

of providing rich,
encompassing wisdom.

It comes up with mental
conundrums instead.

Just as religion lingers on in art

when it's no longer
at the centre of social life,

so beauty lingers on
in contemporary art

when contemporary art is perfectly
fine about being ugly or nondescript

or just visually arbitrary.

It's in the beautiful surroundings
of contemporary art

that the human
appetite for beauty is satisfied.

The wow effect. "Wow," you think,
"all this space just for me."

This has become the familiar
atmosphere of art.

For ages the natural atmosphere
was incense and hymns

and people wearing robes,

because
the place for art was the church,

where art radiated religious wisdom.

The art was beautiful and its beauty
was visually integrated

with the architecture
of the building.

Now there's a sacred atmosphere,
but everything else is different.

Today no-one insists that
artists

better make their
art objects be beautiful.

They can be. A bit.

Or they needn't be.

And they might connect to the
building. Or they don't have to.

The objects don't have to radiate
anything, because the surroundings

are doing all the radiating
considered necessary.

With the magic rituals of the
cavemen, art specials up the space.

With contemporary art,
the space specials up the art.

The principles of
beauty in art build up.

Now beauty in this programme
is going to reach crescendo point,

as once again I return to the
distant past,

and the mighty achievements of
art history present themselves.

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
ceiling,

a beauty experience
I couldn't possibly leave out.

How can man get back to paradise?

That's pretty much the story.

But in terms of beauty the thing
I think still makes an impact,

when you take away
everything you can look

up in books, is the amazing
distorted almost flowing animation

of what you're seeing.

It's such a strong effect that,
for me,

this is actually a great
principle of beauty.

Animation.

Think of a scene, anything.

It's a bit flat.

Then there's a blast of
animating power,

and it's as if life has
been breathed into the situation.

With modern art, it's the energy
that explodes geometric shapes.

They're obviously not real,
but they seem incredibly lively.

With Michelangelo, the liveliness
is in the energy that animates -

tremendous knees, frowns, foreheads,
hair like the turbulent sea.

Twisting, writhing,
muscular movement.

They're not real either,

any more than modern art
abstract brush strokes are real.

They're idealisations of some
strange notion of the godliness

of the human that Michelangelo had
in his head from when he was young.

A good perspective from which to get

what Michelangelo's explosiveness
is about, is not 60 feet below the

ceiling, where everybody usually has
to stand to see it,

but 200 miles away
in these beautiful classical

shadows, where, as a teenager,

Michelangelo was taught ultimate
meaning by humanist scholars,

here at the
San Marco Convent in Florence.

From his lessons he absorbed ideas
about all sorts

different types of erotic and
spiritual love,

the place of God and the place of
man, and the amazing civilisations

of the lost past
and the art they left behind.

All that simmered
in Michelangelo's brain

all through his rise to fame
as a great artist,

until he got the Sistine Chapel
commission,

the first time he could
paint whatever he wanted.

Michelangelo had a mind educated to
think in an epic way, compressing

time, the past, the present
and future all happening at once,

elevating all moods to utter
seriousness, ultimate destiny,

man spiritually united with God.

Constant inner struggle -
how can I be good, the best?

How can I be right, the rightest?

Michelangelo gets the gods of the
past, represented in old sculptures,

and makes them into the
Old Testament

with his new painting style.

A new way of making people stare
with fascination

at their own humanity.

Animation - not like in our time
in the movies in the service of fun.

Instead, in the service of
heavy meaning - what are we?

We're all gonna die.

He does something that doesn't
fit the frame - he has to somehow

put the feeling in, the conventional
Christian message of reassurance.

It bursts beyond that. He's got his
own message, a new kind of physical

form, deformed, not so it's
horrible, but not reassuring either.

As jarring for the culture of
the Renaissance

and just as hair-raising for us.

In fact, you see a man's hair
flowing forwards with the force

of the rush of some kind of wind,
as he's thrown violently backwards.

Nothing's actually
throwing him anywhere.

It's some kind of
inner spirit to the whole painting.

The force of animated energy that,
for me,

beautiful art always
in some way has.

And yet here's somebody who
tones it right down.

Magritte, the great master of
the look of the utterly plain.

Here he is unexpectedly
on the beauty list.

What I think about this famous
surrealist is that, by a series

of steps, he checkmates you into
finding

the utterly plain beautiful.
That makes him modern.

And the principle that drives these
moves is the principle of surprise.

Surprise - art jolts you out of
old ways of seeing,

so you don't see
the same thing all the time.

Magritte skips the natural and plugs
straight into

a sort of hidden wiring
in the mind, the unconscious.

So reality is represented
by a system of signs,

only they're completely unreliable.

Once a look in art gets established,

it's always capable of
being impressive.

You can always find
Michelangelo beautiful,

even though, over time,
beauty in art changes.

Time, shapes, symbols, space -
all these are different for us.

That's why modern art happened.

Beauty in art always has to
have an element of surprise.

You have to re-see the known
so it can be known differently.

Art attacks habit.

Man dreams.

Dreams of ordinary things.

A hat, a mirror,
a bow, a pigeon, a candle, an apple.

They're only signs for things.

But then, he's only a sign for
a man.

Blimey - philosophy!

Where do you begin and
where do you end?

I think you begin with beauty.

You end with surprise!

Surprises in art are
bad when they're shallow.

When they're good it's because they
tell you something true.

When Magritte painted the words,
"This is not a pipe", under a

painting of one, it was true because
it's not a pipe - it's a painting.

Magritte painted
"The Reckless Sleeper" in 1928.

It's not of someone, or
something that necessarily happened.

It is only itself.

It sets up meanings using
simple signs for objects.

But because Magritte is
so baffling about meaning,

a thing he keeps setting up but
never deliberately follows through,

you are returned

to the one thing he doesn't seem
to be interested in at all,

which is beauty.

And you see how
very serious about it he is.

For me, that hat is a beautiful hat.

I see it as one of several
things that Magritte beautifully

interweaves in this painting.

The grey blues of the hat,
bow and pigeon,

and the grey yellows
of the candle, apple and mirror.

They're part of a whole beautiful
pattern of repeats and variations.

The contour of that strange grey
blob below, echoed

by the contour of the blob-shaped
simplified red blanket above.

You've got the beauty
and the attitude of the beauty,

and it's in that that

Magritte is more surprising than
other great geniuses of the modern.

In fact, to me he seems actually
more modern than them.

When Picasso shows you something
ruptured and fractured and

abstracted, he's rocking tradition -
he's saying,

"You can't just go on
obeying tradition."

But actually, compared to Magritte,
he's still quite traditional.

He's saying, "Here's a thing.

"Real women in a real room,
dancing."

It's just that you're
seeing it differently.

The painting is beautiful in
a savage way,

and it's a bit conceptual.

All those rough textures
and strong colours are

all ultimately in the service
of a surprise that delights you.

But with Magritte, you can't
even be sure that it is a thing.

It's beautiful in a jokey way.

It seems to be all conceptual.

But ultimately it is a painting.
It's visual.

It's just that all those perfect
relationships

are all in the service
of a surprise that unhinges you.

Wow! Where are we at now?

All sorts of principles but
gradually a sense of the essential

timeless nature of them,

which is the reason I keep messing
with time in this programme.

Here's a principle of beauty
that is so constant in art, that

probably most people
take it so much for granted,

they don't realise
they're seeing it.

Even an artist as
odd as Magritte does it.

Pattern.

A way of organising visual
experience so it looks nice.

Mosaics again. But mosaics used to
be what painting eventually became,
the main visual language of art.

And I'm looking at mosaics
now in this museum in Tunis,

to focus on the oldest, most
basic element of beauty in art.

What is this? It's a work of art
from the 4th century AD.

A Roman mosaic
from a townhouse in North Africa.

The Romans ruled this area
during the first four centuries AD.

This museum is full of their
mosaics, picturing the good life.

What you're seeing is all the floors
of a single house tipped up to make
a multi-part wall mosaic.

Right at the top, in what would
have been the biggest room, is the
god Oceanus, a patterned face,

the coloured mosaic stones
rhythmically flowing.

Around him, a halo,
a geometric patterned version
of a glow of light.

Underneath him, a flowing pattern of
little love creatures, his children.

And underneath them,

more of Oceanus' offspring, nymphs

and gods made of patterns,
surrounded by an emptiness

that's always patterned,
so isn't really empty at all.

Different types of pattern
everywhere.

Birds in a grid pattern.

The birds have riders,
more offspring of Oceanus.

Winged, flying love gods -
the Erotes.

They're riding
on birds for extra wing power.

Patterns are found in real things,
so they make sense visually
as a kind of abstracting.

The curve of a fishing line,
the curve of a boat,
the curve of an abstract border.

A mosaic is always patterned
simply because of the modular
nature of the medium.

As soon as you put a few mosaic
squares together, a pattern forms.

The pattern possibilities
are endless.

All this is not just a dusty
history lesson with Latin words.

The mosaics express the world
around, the people
the mosaics were made for.

Nature's appearance, that's what
the patterns spring from.

Abstract design and the realistic
world, they bounce off each
other and feed each other ideas.

We think abstract art only
exists in our time to annoy us.

But all art is abstract really.

And all abstraction comes from
the look of the world at any time.

A pattern made of trailing vines.

A pattern made of abstract marks.

The eye gets pleasure
from the beauty in both of them.

Visual effects in art, abstract
values, organising and arranging

visual elements so the
arrangement looks nice.

The same approaches to this problem
in art come back all the time.

Fish in rows by Romans,

fish in rows by Damien Hirst.

Winged love gods by Romans,
pulsing in a grid pattern.

Abstract spots of colour by
Damien Hirst, doing the same thing.

If I analyse
how I'm looking at this,

I find I'm breaking it up into
different configurations.

Picking out one set of colours,
then another,

so I'm seeing a grid pattern
re-making itself endlessly.

The dots
on their own are nothing much.

The overall buzzing grid effect
is good, like nature is good.

With all these patterns,

the pleasure that they give
to the eye

is a metaphor for the pleasure
in life that the picture is about.
Nature.

Art offers nature
in a pattern or a structure

because nature is patterned
and structured in the first place.

Art from the 1950s.

A light bulb blinking.

Torn up newspaper.

Paint dripping.

This might seem like
random rubbish stuck on a canvas.

But I think it's got the beauty of
any beautiful painting from history,
and this is the reason why.

Selection. An artist selects
something and not something else.

It's a painting by Robert
Rauschenberg from 1954.

It's made of bits and pieces
lying around that he's picked up.

Red wood, red paint, red fabric.

A gauze umbrella, some parts
of which he's painted red.

He's gonna bounce all that with
green and white and yellow.

Some of it is personal.

A letter from his mother
that he stuck on, in which

his mother tells him that his sister
has just been made into
a beauty queen.

His own un-beautiful vest.

But most of it is random,
and the impression

of randomness is important
to the energy.

Stuff just lying around
doesn't have energy.

It's the particular stuff
that Rauschenberg has picked

and the way that he's placed it,

so randomness is
no longer randomness, but freshness.

The way that he does it
is not by piling on chaos,

but by having an eye

interested in selecting one thing
instead of another.

At age 24, a beatnik in New York,

Robert Rauschenberg
is lost in space.

Working fast in a frenzy, but also
emotionally a little bit zoned out,

not really caring about the personal
nature of the stuff

he's chucking in, and caring more
about its texture

and colour, and how they answer
other textures and colours.

He selects the junk that will
work with the junk already selected.

A yellow light bulb,
the gloopy, distorted shape of a
reflection on a bit of old mirror.

They connect visually.

The yellow drip, the yellow bulb.

They connect. Some junk is smeared,
some junk is compartmentalised.

Some junk here, some junk there.

It's rubbish talking to rubbish
visually.

A compartmentalised look is very
ancient visual tradition in art.

The Romans did that kind of thing.
They stuck gods and other things
they liked inside rectangles.

With Rauschenberg, it's a
letter and his vest.

Because it's rubbish and not gods,
because there's only a very fine
difference

between his art and mere randomness,

Rauschenberg draws your attention
even more to the selection
principle.

Rauschenberg is faced
with everything,
just to cut it down to something.

So he finds relationships,
he finds a spring and a
tension between elements.

I think this painting has as
much beauty as anything in
Medieval art of Renaissance art.

But it's not the same beauty,
because it isn't answering the same
society's understanding of reality.

We don't have the same sense of
hierarchies.

We don't all necessarily have God.

We're open-minded about the
difference between the random
and the important.

The painting is called Charlene.
That's the name of a dancer he knew.

He was friendly
with a modern dance company.

Now, that information
really is random,
the title doesn't do anything.

The selection does it.

This isn't random.

This is beauty.

We're near the end
of the Beauty programme

and we still haven't heard about
the commonest and most
delightful kind of beauty of all,

the ordinary beauty
of a beautiful face.

You see one, there's a
rush of feeling, like the rush of
pleasure from beautiful art.

There's something spontaneous
about it, which is my
last principle behind beauty in art.

Spontaneity.

Don't be how everybody else
wants you to be, be yourself.

Be spontaneous.

Here are some beautiful faces in
real life, in Paris,
at a street party.

Here's a beautiful place in a
painting by Gauguin, in a museum.

These are real,
this one is idealised.

These are happy and animated,
the party is going on, men are
meeting women, love is in the air.

Here, green is in the air and red
and yellow and orange and blue.

The path is red and
the dog is orange.

For Gauguin, living and working in
Paris in the late 19th century,
the West was corrupt.

So Gauguin left the bad West,
and went round the other side of the
world, to the South Sea Islands,

where he spent his last years,
painting scenes like this,

man's eternal striving to
return to Paradise.

The ideal that
Michelangelo attempted to depict
in Renaissance art.

Only here, it's the early stages of
Modern Art and the Paradise is a
real place you can actually go to.

The title is a Tahitian word for joy
or joyousness.

He painted it in 1892.

He had ten years to live.

He lived in an incredibly
squalid situation, full of filth,

poverty and oppression of the
natives by the French authorities.

Gauguin himself partly wanted to
free the natives to be themselves

and partly wanted to exploit them,
taking the younger ones as lovers.

When he died, he was covered in
sores, his leg was suppurating,
he had eczema and syphilis.

His body lay in a mess of
filth and hypodermic syringes.

He used morphine to kill the pain
of his real existence.

While in his paintings,
he put together scenes
of a paradise on Earth.

It might seem at first to be a
straightforward sexy paradise where
everyone dances around totem poles

and acts spontaneously and pouts at
you when they're playing the flute.

But it's not a pre-camera snapshot
of a South Sea Island scene,
it's an idealisation.

Gauguin made it up and what went
into it was a series of decisions

about colour and materials and each
one was a jump into the unknown.

He doesn't just fill in shapes,
he doesn't get inspired
colour combinations

from a colour matching chart,
he improvises them,

spontaneously
and those improvisations make up
the personality of the painting.

Gauguin pushes paint around
until the picture

seems to be going in a good
direction
and when he finally gets there,

he's not at all sure what it is.

I look at the woman.
She's a cartoon, really.

She's not of that much interest.
I look at the painting as a whole,
I see that the colour is powerful -

those contrasts
and harmonies of colour.

At the time, they seemed jarring to
Gauguin's audience.

It didn't seem like art at all.

But we've come to see that kind
of colour as a way of making

art beautiful and we appreciate
Gauguin for that colour.

So it's the beauty of the painting
as a whole that makes the woman
beautiful, not the other way round.

To me, that painting isn't really
a picture of a land where it's
better to live than France,

but a concentrated expression
of beauty, the real purpose of which

is to make anyone feel life is
worth living wherever you are.

Gauguin's colour patches are
part of the beginning of modern art

so he will be there in the abstract
squares that are about to appear.

50 years after Gauguin's death,
Matisse experiments with
spontaneity.

His painted sheets of paper
and their torn edges are his version
of Gauguin's spontaneity.

His version of nature is there, too.

It is called The Snail.

The circularity from the centre
outwards suggests the well-known
form of that animal's shell.

Into the whirling vortex of
Matisse's wonky squares,

time compresses,
the past and the present join up

and I can now
answer the question I raised at the
beginning of this programme:

"Is art beautiful because
of what it's of
or because of how it's done?"

My answer is both.

Society changes, so over time,
what it's considered important
to make pictures of changes.

It might be supernatural beings
or it might be abstract shapes.

It might be idealised people whose
perfection suggests a cosmic order,
or it might be

idealised versions of nature
done with a freshness

that suggests a sort of
wondrous illumination about life.

But whatever it is, it reflects
what we think we are,
what we think reality is.

When we find art beautiful,
we're seeing what we want to
see, what we're interested in.

We don't realise there are
actually reasons for the beauty,

visual traditions that have
built up over ages.

They are based on observation of
what's all around us all the time.

And they make the artistic
reflection of our changed selves

not just recognisable,
but powerfully, richly recognisable.

They make the reflection beautiful.

Matisse's collage is a natural,
organic form, a spiral...

done with unnatural shapes,
straight lines and hard edges.

There aren't any straight lines
in nature, but Matisse
makes you re-see organic form

by creating it in an unexpected way,
just like all the artists

in this programme have been doing,
riffs on nature and artifice.

Well, that's the end of this
personal top ten beautiful things.

You might be thinking that Matisse
should have had his own place on it

instead of just a brief mention when
the list was over but, after all,

the list is potentially endless
because anyone can make their own.

You can start making your own
right now and put him on it.

Goodbye.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk